“There's Nothing To Writing. All You Do Is Sit Down At A Typewriter And Open A Vein.” ~Red Smith

Once upon a time there was a little girl who wrote and wrote and wrote, all the time time time. And when she wasn't writing writing writing, she would read read read, hiding under her covers at night with a flashlight, savagely digesting every fat, juicy word printed onto the pages that she gripped with such tenacity, it was as if the book would up and fly away if not for her small-handed security.

Eventually the little girl would hear her father's voice coming from her doorway.

"It's late," he would say as the girl poked just her eyes above the covers, glaring at this unwanted yet completely expected interruption.

"Your mother would want you to go to sleep."

The little girl's mother was always already asleep because it was always, in fact, quite late. Always.

The father would leave and the girl would return to reading. Whenever she heard footsteps she would click off her flashlight and pretend to sleep. She wasn't always quick enough, and so her father would poke his head in and, while still whispering, bark, "Bed! Now!"

So the flashlight went out for good but the book stayed safely under the covers.

Two counts of ten for good measure and the book resurfaced. Straining her eyes until they refocused and became used to the blackness, the little girl read in the dark until she blinked and didn't un-blink till morning.

But back back back to when she wrote wrote wrote. She produced stories like a first grade one-woman assembly line. She never knew what her stories were going to be about when she picked up her pencil- she still doesn't-, little movies just played out in her head and she wrote down what happened. She had very little control. This became problematic years later, when the girl's college professors would try to get her to tweak a storyline and she flat out refused.

"But that's not what happens." she would protest, confused as to why her doctorate-weilding teachers did not grasp this.

Professor So-And-So and Dr. What's-Her-Face never seemed to take this as a valid excuse so the girl would snatch the paper back, go to her dorm, and bitterly change a few words here and there, take out a couple of sentences- but just a couple- and maybe add a slight change to a storyline, depending on how critical the paper was towards her final grade. Then she would stubbornly write three more pages that returned the story back to its original plot, just for passive-aggresive funsies.

In time, her teachers finally caught on that the girl, who was seemingly shy and introverted, turned into a no-holds-barred beast when it came to her writing- fiercely protective of every letter, word, and phrase.

The bottom line was, the girl cared more about what she thought of her writing than what other people thought of it. Prose before hoes.

She wrote her first story when she was five, and finished her first book (that's right suckers, I- er- she wrote a book. A BOOK.) when she was in high school.

In elementary school she wrote about animals, in junior high and high school she wrote depressing poetry, and in college she wrote about sex and boys.

Now she writes about writing. And boys. And sex. Not so much about animals anymore.

One thing has remained the same, though. When the girl writes, she goes deaf. Her sight is limited to the paper or screen in front of her. She feels wave after wave of happiness, anger, inconsolable sadness, frustration, and hope- all while experiencing the most comforting and serene calm you could ever imagine. When the girl writes, you don't matter, and you don't matter, and neither do you. And you? All the way over there? You don't matter either.

So that's that. A little anecdote about a little girl who wrote wrote wrote and read read read. And always will will will.